CO2, destroyer of entire continents at the touch of a knob

From the University of New Hampshire and the department of “CO2 controls everything with a single big red knob” (as stated in the article) comes this modeling inanity. Never mind that after the continental breakup the continent of Antarctica is now on the bottom of the world and gets dark for months and super cold, nooooo, it’s CO2 wot dun it. Climate models can’t even get the present right, so I have serious doubts they’ll get 34 million years ago, where we have far less data, right either.

Antarctic ice sheet is result of CO2 decrease, not continental breakup

DURHAM, N.H. – Climate modelers from the University of New Hampshire have shown that the most likely explanation for the initiation of Antarctic glaciation during a major climate shift 34 million years ago was decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The finding counters a 40-year-old theory suggesting massive rearrangements of Earth’s continents caused global cooling and the abrupt formation of the Antarctic ice sheet. It will provide scientists insight into the climate change implications of current rising global CO2 levels.

In a paper published today in Nature, Matthew Huber of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and department of Earth sciences provides evidence that the long-held, prevailing theory known as “Southern Ocean gateway opening” is not the best explanation for the climate shift that occurred during the Eocene-Oligocene transition when Earth’s polar regions were ice-free.

“The Eocene-Oligocene transition was a major event in the history of the planet and our results really flip the whole story on its head,” says Huber. “The textbook version has been that gateway opening, in which Australia pulled away from Antarctica, isolated the polar continent from warm tropical currents, and changed temperature gradients and circulation patterns in the ocean around Antarctica, which in turn began to generate the ice sheet. We’ve shown that, instead, CO2-driven cooling initiated the ice sheet and that this altered ocean circulation.”

Huber adds that the gateway theory has been supported by a specific, unique piece of evidence—a “fingerprint” gleaned from oxygen isotope records derived from deep-sea sediments. These sedimentary records have been used to map out gradient changes associated with ocean circulation shifts that were thought to bear the imprint of changes in ocean gateways.

Although declining atmospheric levels of CO2 has been the other main hypothesis used to explain the Eocene-Oligocene transition, previous modeling efforts were unsuccessful at bearing this out because the CO2 drawdown does not by itself match the isotopic fingerprint. It occurred to Huber’s team that the fingerprint might not be so unique and that it might also have been caused indirectly from CO2 drawdown through feedbacks between the growing Antarctic ice sheet and the ocean.

Says Huber, “One of the things we were always missing with our CO2 studies, and it had been missing in everybody’s work, is if conditions are such to make an ice sheet form, perhaps the ice sheet itself is affecting ocean currents and the climate system—that once you start getting an ice sheet to form, maybe it becomes a really active part of the climate system and not just a passive player.”

For their study, Huber and colleagues used brute force to generate results: they simply modeled the Eocene-Oligocene world as if it contained an Antarctic ice sheet of near-modern size and shape and explored the results within the same kind of coupled ocean-atmosphere model used to project future climate change and across a range of CO2 values that are likely to occur in the next 100 years (560 to 1200 parts per million).

“It should be clear that resolving these two very different conceptual models for what caused this huge transformation of the Earth’s surface is really important because today as a global society we are, as I refer to it, dialing up the big red knob of carbon dioxide but we’re not moving continents around.”

Just what caused the sharp drawdown of CO2 is unknown, but Huber points out that having now resolved whether gateway opening or CO2 decline initiated glaciation, more pointed scientific inquiry can be focused on answering that question.

Huber notes that despite his team’s finding, the gateway opening theory won’t now be shelved, for that massive continental reorganization may have contributed to the CO2 drawdown by changing ocean circulation patterns that created huge upwellings of nutrient-rich waters containing plankton that, upon dying and sinking, took vast loads of carbon with them to the bottom of the sea.

Climate-modelers are the new scientific crack-addicts. Evidence? nah! we have a computer.
Mind, they did not just use any model, but one to which “brute force” is applied
“For their study, Huber and colleagues used brute force to generate results”
Sounds to me like they figuratively banged on the the code until it gave them the answer they wanted.
and this is in Nature. I used to think of that publication as the ultimate in prestigious. Apparently the crap has floated to the top. I mean I could be wrong but .. wow.

It appears that in the last 18 years, all this additional CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere is making the sea ice surrounding the Antarctic to grow. Has anyone looked into that possible scenario, in that CO2 may actually be causing more cooling?

Sure the atmosphere drives the oceans, I get it. What’s not to like ? We have our ultimate culprit, a small trace gas with reach beyond reason. Yet they still can’t predict a hurricane movement beyond 10 days. So some brute force in the Southern North Atlantic seems to be needed.

The red knob gave me a tech idea that Jeremy Rifkin would love. All devices that emit CO2 would have emission thermostats networked to a central server( or servers) with a program to maintain optimum world temperature. Think about the implications for political parties – there could be an Arctic Party, a Tropical Party, a Temperate party, etc. Such an idea might actually become feasible long before we develop new energy sources at current rates!

I don’t often refer to research as ‘weapons grade stupid’ but, I am ‘brute forced’ to make an exception.
Where would they get the idea that CO2 levels might be 1200 ppm within the next 100 years?
How exactly do you draw a conclusion that the initiation of glaciation was caused by the interaction of the already formed ice sheet and CO2 levels? And they used unvalidated models to boot.

that once you start getting an ice sheet to form, maybe it becomes a really active part of the climate system and not just a passive player.”
Well if that be the case, we had best start pumping CO2 into the atmosphere as fast as we can to fight the monster. Considering how much we’ve pumped into the atmosphere in the last 34 years or so, it looks like the monster is unaffected and just continues to grow:http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
We’re in a war with the ice sheet and we’re losing! It is worse than we thought!

These people are desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to concoct data to prop up the IPCC’s shaky supposition that CO2 emitted from human activities is causing catastrophic global warming and is the key driver of climate change.
Its bull!

The only thing that comes between this claim and world fame is a hint of truth. They seem well suited to their day job and should keep them because that way we’re always only one election away from defunding the morons.

I have the biggest database of paleoclimate Temperature and CO2 estimates of anyone I guess. 17,000 individual temperature estimates going back 2.4 billion years and 2600 CO2 estimates going back 750 million years.
This is the last 40 million years of both (with CO2 represented as 3.0C per doubling). Sorry, CO2 did not fall until 2.5 million years after the initial glaciation of Antarctica (actually the fourth initial glaciation since Antarctica has has the unfortunate fortune of being placed at the south pole by continental drift at least 3 other times previously when it became fully glaciated).http://s27.postimg.org/rcd80vq03/Antarctic_Glaciation_33_6_Mya.png
A chart showing some of the important geographic and temperature changes over the last 45 million years.http://s22.postimg.org/804qp4xo1/Temp_Geography_45_Mys.png
Antarctica glaciates over, no change in CO2. Then CO2 finally falls below 280 ppm for perhaps the very first time in history and Antarctica promptly unglaciates. CO2 stays flat for another 13 million years while Antarctica is only half glaciated. Then 14 million years ago, the glaciers advance and CO2 does not change. etc. etc. CO2 has nothing to do with it. It is whether the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is fully operating or not. And that is determined by continental drift and whether individual continental landmasses or even small cratons between South America and Antarctica are blocking it.
Climate scientists cannot be objective it seems.

Bill Illis says:
July 30, 2014 at 9:11 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Aww, gee Bill. You had to muddle up the discussion with the facts. Here I was trying to convince everyone that the paper was right and the ice monster was coming after us. Everyone do your part, leave your SUV idling all night!
Seriously thanks. I was about to embark on a research mission to see if glaciation correlated with CO2. You’ve saved me hours and hours and hours.

……;;;the most likely explanation for the initiation of Antarctic glaciation during a major climate shift 34 million years ago was decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. ….. It will provide scientists insight into the climate change implications of current rising global CO2 levels.
—————————————————————————————————————–
Now hang on a tick chaps. We know that temp changes preceded CO2 variation. So to assume the reverse happened 34 million years ago just follows the fanciful upside-down Gore “theory”. So how is this going to provide “insight” to determine how CO2 would determine temps in the future?
How do these dingbats get away with this nonsense?

I just love the way that in these models the Earth’s temperature is reduced to a single variable equation. That is, carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide alone is the only variable that has any effect. Nothing else matters, continental positions, ocean currents, ocean volume, solar intensity, axial tilt, rotation rate, tides caused by the Moon being closer. There are a myriad other variables that were different 34 Ma ago. It all distills down to one single trace gas.
Computer models can only predict what you program into them. They cannot come up with alternative hypotheses or results.

Science is beautiful and terrible. Just check in on Lubos Motl’s blog to see that. It’s a fine balance forevermore between dumb logic and empiricism. As if art itself isn’t good enough, or music, some buffoons must push for an alternative to old religious books in physics. But the only alternative is in CHEMISTRY, baby!

Bill Illis says:
July 30, 2014 at 9:11 pm
>>>>>>>>>>
Bill, in the first link, I am baffled by what the orange line represents. At first glance, I thought it was simply CO2 concentration anomalies. But on closer inspection, it seems to be some sort of quantification of warming due to CO2 based on a sensitivity of 3.0 degrees C per doubling. Can you expand on this? As written, it makes little sense.

“brute force”?
Do they even KNOW what that means in CS (Computer Science), in cryptology?
Why don’t they lookup “brute force attack”. It simply means: enumerates all possible inputs until you obtain the desired output. As in: in order to solve “x is a 3 letters string, md5(x) = 900150983CD24FB0D6963F7D28E17F72”, you enumerate all 3 letters string, until you find x = “abc”. You can brute force a DES key.
In order to brute force something, you need to know the cypher, or hash, used. In order to brute force nature, you would need to know the correct equation (not poor models) and the exact final state.
Silly, just silly…

“If in doubt give it a clout. If at first you don’t succeed get a bigger hammer”
I thought my motto for fixing things mechanical wouldn’t work for computers but they seem to have managed it They hammered it until it fitted with there first thought. It reminds me of Stan Laurel doing a jigsaw(I can’t find the clip) but he is using a hammer!
James Bull

I’m actually delighted and amused when I see such absurd peer-reviewed papers being passed off as real scientific inquiry….
Fatuous peer-reviewed papers like this one that Nature has the audacity to publish in their once prestigious magazine just shows how far the “science” of climatology has descended; they’re bordering on the 8th circle of Dante’s hell (fraud) and slowly making their way into the 9th ring (treachery/treason).
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” ~Dante’s Devine Comedy…
This is the sign that should hang above the doors to Nature’s headquarters…..
I just can’t comprehend how scientists outside the climatology cult can allow scientific integrity to be so disparaged. Their silence is deafening.
Can’t other scientists appreciate the blowback that is coming against science in general once the CAGW hypothesis is officially thrown on the trash heap of failed ideas???
Do they really hope to escape unscathed after the world has wasted $TRILLIONS on this CAGW scam??
When will it end?
When will more scientists with integrity and a conscience start making a stand against this CAGW madness?

Once again they confuse cause and effect. Like Al Gore’s ice core trick, where he forgets to point out that CO2 is a RESULT of temperature change.
Of course there will be a positive feedback ( amplifying effect ) from CO2 when there is dramatic cooling, that does not replace the gateway theory, it is simply amplifies the change making it more rapid.
Unlike the current situation where CO2 warming effects are very nearly saturated going the other way once they get a lot lower they will much more important. Contrary to what they suggest, that makes no difference to the current climate and near saturated CO2 effects.
We already know that the climate models they are using are too sensitive to changes in radiative forcing, so if they run them back to conditions where CO2 is much lower and the CO2 would really be more significant, the results may well be more dramatic.
That this contradicts other paleo evidence is yet further proof that the models are exaggerating CO2 forcing,
Thanks you Dr Huber, yet more proof the models are of little use.

Huber does not understand any of the knobs. It is astonishing how many new knobs are about to be discovered and the implication to humanity and to fundamental science that will result due to what has started to happen and will happen.
The drop in atmospheric CO2 occurred millions of years after the Antarctic ice sheet started to form. CO2 is not the knob that causes the ice epoches. It is a fact that the planet has been warm (no ice sheets) when atmospheric CO2 levels where roughly (300 pm) and the planet has been cold (ice sheets) when atmospheric CO2 levels were 1000 pm. The ice epoches (the planetary temperature changes) do not correlate with CO2 changes. That is a paradox (an observation which is not possible based on the AGW theory and modeling.)
The CO2 mechanism saturates due to the fact that there is free charge in the upper atmosphere. This fact explains why the CO2 AGW theory’s predicted tropical tropospheric hot spot at roughly 8km was not been observed.
Observations rather than thoughtful discussion is going to end the climate wars. Unfortunately the reason for the majority of the warming in the last 50 years is over. We are going to experience significant unequivocal global cooling. The warmists have ignored record sea ice in the Antarctic they will not be able to ignore record sea ice in the Arctic, dropping high latitude average temperatures both hemispheres.http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.pnghttp://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png

davidmhoffer says:
July 30, 2014 at 10:16 pm
//////////////////////
I am pleased to note that I am not the only one who was somewhat confused about this data set. About 2 weeks ago, Bill posted some of his data in response to a comment of mine.
His data seems not simply extensive, but also very interesting, but it is important to know precisely what it is setting out.
I share the view expressed by Lance Wallace (at July 30, 2014 at 10:13 pm) that it would be very useful if Bill would be prepared to share his data (which must have invoolved much time and effort to compile) and provide a link to it. And I share your view, that it would be useful if Bill would clarify precisely what the data is dealing with.
That said, the thrust of Bill’s comments set out above seem correct, so too the observation by Andrew N (at July 30, 2014 at 9:54 pm). albeit I am not sure that differences in the rotation, length of day and distance from the moon were that significant when going back just 34 to 45 million years (on longer timescales they are, and I am unsure to what extent full account of these factors is taken into account in the so called weak sun paradox).

A red button? Is that not what Hillary Clinton used to “re-set” the diplomatic “climate” between the USA and The USSR? Just a few short years ago?. How can these guys be called scientists or intelligent for that matter.

“How do these dingbats get away with this nonsense?”
The dingbats are giving the politicians what they want; reason to control and tax everyone’s activities. Hence they have the ear of the rulers and the rulers return the favor by lavishly supporting their efforts.
The dingbats are giving the mainstream media want they want. The media loves high drama and stories of our needing to avoid catastrophe. Plus, the media is the propaganda arm of the governmental/industrial complex.
The dingbats are giving industry want they want to boot. This may seem counter-intuitive but in a corporatist economy such as ours, the favored large industries love regulation as it keeps out competitors and strengthens their position. (see “regulatory capture” for example)
And finally today, let us not forget that the real dingbats are the left-wing do-gooders who want to “save the world” using other people’s money. They claim to want to help the poor and the working class as they promote policies that do the very opposite.
There are more players, and one could say more about the above listed players in this game of de-industrialize the West, but that is enough to answer the question I think.

Once you have CO2 on the brain how is it possible to think of anything else. It may be time for the psychiatrists to investigate a linkage between higher levels of CO2 and mental illness. At least they would have a new Federal agency as a source for all sorts of interesting studies.
Seriously, isn’t this obsession with CO2 denigrating the scientific inquiry process that has been the cornerstone of science for centuries? A true mental block.

When they get their hands on data, they play good climate scientist – bad climate scientist with it until the data confesses.
Oh and only hit the data with telephone books; that way you leave no traces.

CO2 drawdown? How much? If it needs be down to about 150 ppm or so, there should have been a great extinction at the time since plants don’t grow well, or at all, at or below that level. I do not believe there is any evidence for an extinction event 35M years ago.

I put these databases up online once, it is linked to all the original data sources and simple enough to understand. But not.a single person downloaded it afterward. I suppose I should do it again, but it will take a little cleaning up and re-checking the source data links.

NikFromNYC says:
July 30, 2014 at 10:11 pm
“Science is beautiful and terrible. Just check in on Lubos Motl’s blog to see that. It’s a fine balance forevermore between dumb logic and empiricism. As if art itself isn’t good enough, or music, some buffoons must push for an alternative to old religious books in physics. But the only alternative is in CHEMISTRY, baby!”
____________________
Do you mean CHEMISTRY that one studies on the way to realizing that the true alternative is physics, or do you mean CHEMISTRY that could prompt one to go past physics to metaphysics?

Until the table of sources and sinks is correct, and the carbon cycle is understood, it is not possible for the models to have any value.
The US EPA Methane and Nitrous Oxide Emissions From Natural Sources, US EPA 430-R-10-001, April 2010, Page ES5, lists upland soils as a 30Tg sink. This is physicaly impossible.
Once methane is in the atmosphere, it rises.
This 30Tg error is included in the IPCC’s latest balance of sinks and sources as a 30Tg topsoil sink.
This IPCC inclusion of only the 30Tg US sink number must be a political calculation because the logical deduction is that none of the topsoil anywhere else in the world is a sink, making the balance sheet even more of a farce.

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V3/N7/C1.php
“Hence, in this best explanation yet for the impressive correlation of CO2 and air temperature over glacial-interglacial cycles, atmospheric CO2 variations are the result of temperature variations …
“Once again, therefore, we have another demonstration of the fact that it is changes in air temperature that drive changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration and not the reverse phenomenon, which figures so highly in GCM predictions of continued global warming as a result of the rising CO2 content of earth’s atmosphere.”

“One of the things we were always missing with our CO2 studies, and it had been missing in everybody’s work, is if conditions are such to make an ice sheet form, perhaps the ice sheet itself is affecting ocean currents and the climate system—that once you start getting an ice sheet to form, maybe it becomes a really active part of the climate system and not just a passive player.”
Errrrrr…….Really ? Never would have thought of that.

“We’ve shown that, instead, CO2-driven cooling initiated the ice sheet and that this altered ocean circulation.”
Yeah, you know what else is good at altering the ocean’s circulation? A combination of the Correolis Effect coupled with the Conservation of Angular Momentum.
So CO2 is driving the ocean currents now? Newton and Kepler are most certainly flabbergasted at this “science.”

Bill Illis:
Another vote for the motion that you ask if Anthony (or somebody) would host your data, say, on a permalink. To protect the integrity, make it so only you or established reputable editors could edit, change, delete data (new data are coming all the time, as you well know).
The graphs you posted are MOST invaluable! They once again show the correlation between CO2 and temperature is non-existent (outside of natural variation, of course).
Thanks in advance,
Mark H.

Climate models can’t even get the present right, so I have serious doubts they’ll get 34 million years ago, where we have far less data, right either.

It would be impossible to know even if they did get it right. We don’t even know with certainty what temps were 1000 years ago. All we have are proxies and guesses. Running such a model is pointless, except as a fanciful exercise.

Mark Stoval…
In answer to your question..
‘“How do these dingbats get away with this nonsense?”
The MSM is the absolute key IMO.
One thing this whole sorry business is teaching the world is the extreme danger in having, and accepting as a given—a partisan left wing MSM.
A really questioning media with investigative journalists on the case would have surely put this whole thing to rest years ago, when the global ‘consensus’ was announced and then enforced—- before most of the science was even done.
A non-partisan media would have questioned the expunging from history of the MWP and LIA in order to accommodate the hockey stick—and they wouldn’t have given up on it.
A non-partisan media would surely have followed the ‘science’ down every rabbit hole, listened to and would have given at least some credit to hitherto highly-respected scientists who are now pariahs because they question the ‘consensus’ and provide alternative research and findings.
They wouldn’t have tolerated the gate-keeping on such a huge issue.
Without a sceptical MSM, dingbats and ratbags run riot.
The only good thing about this latest product is that it’s from New Hampshire and not from Australia—-and for a little while anyway—it takes the spotlight off our own Australian dingbats , who use our hard-earned taxpayers’ money to scramble brains with their ‘scientific’ notions of giving ourselves over to the ‘great global super-organism’—a ‘global intelligence’ that will do our thinking for us apparently—their claims of 97% of scientists agree’—and their ‘conspiracy ideation’ theory etc etc.

The Climate Science Three-Step Dance:
1. Design, build, and run climate model-based computer simulations of reality.
2. Note how well the simulation results match what you anticipated they would be thus confirming what you expect was, is, and/or will be reality.
3. Write it up and publish while you finalize the next round of funding.
Repeat until retirement or perhaps until you find honest work as a paid activist and/or lobbyist.

Ok. This one takes the cake in terms of climate gravy train chasing. It is on par with insurance fraud wrapped around faked injuries. Science is fast becoming a tabloid industry. Heads up to real scientists from every discipline: If you fail to police your own, you may be at risk of being swept up in the aftermath of public disdain.

“initiation of Antarctic glaciation”
there are two theories.
neither can be tested by future observation.
A) we cannot re arrange the continents
B) we cannot drop C02 content.
That means the only way to understand the past is to.
A) collect what TRACES we have of past events —
B) model the past and see which theory provides the “best explanation”
“In a paper published today in Nature, Matthew Huber of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and department of Earth sciences provides evidence that the long-held, prevailing theory known as “Southern Ocean gateway opening” is not the best explanation for the climate shift that occurred during the Eocene-Oligocene transition when Earth’s polar regions were ice-free.”
Now in observational science, in sciences that focus on the past, in sciences where the “thing’
studied is bigger than a lab, you have nothing to do except model. And, you cant do controlled experiments. It’s hard to make predictions, so the focus is “understanding” or “explanation”
Now, note
“Huber notes that despite his team’s finding, the gateway opening theory won’t now be shelved, for that massive continental reorganization may have contributed to the CO2 drawdown by changing ocean circulation patterns that created huge upwellings of nutrient-rich waters containing plankton that, upon dying and sinking, took vast loads of carbon with them to the bottom of the sea.”
Note that the previous theory doesnt get “falsified” the move will be to incorporate the parts of it that are required for a more complete understanding.
On brute forcing the model. That is a perfectly sensible modelling approach.
In past modelling the ice sheet was represented as a “passive thing”
continent change –> circulation change–> ice sheet
brute forcing an ice sheet change up front shows you how the last two items might be reversed or re inforce each other
“Says Huber, “One of the things we were always missing with our CO2 studies, and it had been missing in everybody’s work, is if conditions are such to make an ice sheet form, perhaps the ice sheet itself is affecting ocean currents and the climate system—that once you start getting an ice sheet to form, maybe it becomes a really active part of the climate system and not just a passive player.”
as with all historical science the level of understanding is never complete.

FrankK says:
July 30, 2014 at 9:24 pm
. . .
Now hang on a tick chaps. We know that temp changes preceded CO2 variation. . . .
Not really:http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~wxcheng/envs23/lecture3/weathering.html
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been declining for over half-a-billion years, at least so you would say given the overall trend. Really, CO2 crashed in the Permian/Triassic ca. 300 to 250-million years ago. It then covered to about a quarter the starting level and has been crashing since. The present levels are comparable to the Permian. The estimated peak value prior to the Permian is around 6,000 ppm. The maximum recovery, during the Mesozoic, was about 1,500 ppm and levels have been declining since. The errors of the geocarb estimate make the figures pretty soft, but geocarb remains the standard for estimating atmospheric CO2 over the Phanerozoic.

So basically this study says higher CO2 is GOOD because it’ll open up a whole new continent for habitation. But, of course, all the other continents were a barren, lifeless wasteland of searing heat before Antarctica froze, right? Oh wait, they weren’t.
Where do these amateurs get their training at the proper development and use of models & sims? Sheesh.

Mosher, you forgot the third theory: the anticipation of a drop in CO2 caused rearrangement of the continents and opening of the Drake Passage. That should be obvious from the current great scientific consensus that rising CO2 will close the Drake Passage and melt Antarctica’s ice.

This “research” strikes me as “drug-related.”
Consider Sole, Turiel and Llebot writing in Physics Letters A (366 [2007] 184–189) identified three classes of D-O oscillations in the Greenland GISP2 ice cores A (brief), B (medium) and C (long), reflecting the speed at which the warming relaxes back to the cold glacial state:
“In this work ice-core CO2 time evolution in the period going from 20 to 60 kyr BP [15] has been qualitatively compared to our temperature cycles, according to the class they belong to. It can be observed in Fig. 6 that class A cycles are completely unrelated to changes in CO2 concentration. We have observed some correlation between B and C cycles and CO2 concentration, but of the opposite sign to the one expected: maxima in atmospheric CO2 concentration tend to correspond to the middle part or the end the cooling period. The role of CO2 in the oscillation phenomena seems to be more related to extend the duration of the cooling phase than to trigger warming. This could explain why cycles not coincident in time with maxima of CO2 (A cycles) rapidly decay back to the cold state. ”
“Nor CO2 concentration either the astronomical cycle change the way in which the warming phase takes place. The coincidence in this phase is strong among all the characterized cycles; also, we have been able to recognize the presence of a similar warming phase in the early stages of the transition from glacial to interglacial age. Our analysis of the warming phase seems to indicate a universal triggering mechanism, what has been related with the possible existence of stochastic resonance [1,13, 21]. It has also been argued that a possible cause for the repetitive sequence of D/O events could be found in the change in the thermohaline Atlantic circulation [2,8,22,25]. However, a cause for this regular arrangement of cycles, together with a justification on the abruptness of the warming phase, is still absent in the scientific literature.”
In their work, at least 13 of the 24 D-O oscillations (indeed other workers suggest the same for them all), CO2 was not the agent provocateur of the warmings but served to ameliorate the relaxation back to the cold glacial state, something which might have import whenever we finally do reach the end Holocene. Instead of triggering the abrupt warmings it appears to function as somewhat of a climate “security blanket”, if you will.
So if this can actually be had both ways, we will need a big red knob for matter CO2 infecting the northern hemisphere and another big red knob for the antimatter CO2 that may be infecting the southern hemisphere.

“Climate modelers from the University of New Hampshire have shown that the most likely explanation for the initiation of Antarctic glaciation during a major climate shift 34 million years ago was decreased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.”
Once I read “Climate Modelers” my brain turns off and I get angry as to how our tax dollars are totally wasted.
This is not science, it is like astrology.
Anyone who has worked with any computer models knows that they are GIGO unless one has a grasp of all the physical equations in the model which is impossible for 35 million years ago.

It is interesting to me that this is not something new, the theory was expounded using climate models back in 2003.
DeConto, R.D. and D. Pollard, 2003. Rapid Cenozoic glaciation of Antarctica triggered by declining atmospheric CO2. Nature, 421, 245-249.
Abstract: The sudden, wide-spread glaciation of Antarctica and the associated shift toward colder temperatures at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary (~34 Ma)1-4 is one of the most fundamental reorganizations of the global climate system recognized in the geologic record. The established paradigm for the glaciation of Antarctica centers on the tectonic opening of Southern Ocean gateways, allowing the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), subsequent thermal isolation of the Antarctic continent, and glacial inception5. This inception and early growth of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is simulated using a coupled GCM-dynamical ice sheet-sediment model, accounting for paleogeography, greenhouse gas concentrations, changing orbital parameters, and varying ocean heat transport. In our model, declining Cenozoic CO2 first allows small, highly dynamic ice caps to form on high Antarctic plateaus. Later, a CO2 threshold is crossed, initiating ice-sheet height-mass balance feedbacks that allow the ice caps to expand rapidly with large orbital variations, eventually coalescing into a continental-scale EAIS. The opening of Southern Ocean gateways is shown to play a secondary role to CO2 in the Paleogene “greenhouse” to “icehouse” transition.
The fact that the most recent paper indicates they can’t shelve the SO gateway theory with their modeling work suggest to me there is nothing new here….what they are proposing is exactly what was proposed back in 2003. Whether it is correct or not the only thing new about it is they presumably used more sophisticated ocean/atmosphere circulation models.
[” (~34 Ma)1-4″ means “34 million years ago”, right? The 1-4 are references then, defiend later in that paper? .mod]

“Just what caused the sharp drawdown of CO2 is unknown”
Might it have been a sharp reduction in temperature that preceded it? That would be consistent with every notable temperature change as per proxy ice core data from Antarctica.

It isn’t possible for a climate model to find that anything other than CO2 is the cause of anything, because nothing there is nothing else allowed for in the climate models. They don’t have Earth orbit variation coded, they don’t have any solar cycle or its effect coded (they don’t know how to), they don’t have any ocean oscillation or its effect coded (ditto), they don’t have any atmospheric oscillation or its effect coded (ditto). Whatever they try to model, there is only one possible cause. In the model, that is, not in the real world.

This study is sheer speculation and attempts to invent a role for CO2 that does not exist. It is hand-waving at its very worst, an invention, a fairy tale. It is so speculative that one resigns in the attempt to study the errors.Then there is the monstrous claim of “having resolved whether CO2 or gateway opening initiated glaciation” by the egoistic Huber. This is science at its worst, disgustingly so.

Mosher:
Do you buy into this rank speculation? Note that Huber confesses that he can offer no explanation for the CO2. What kind of science is that? I will tell you… it is called bald assertion.
But perhaps you do not care.

davidmhoffer says:
July 30, 2014 at 10:16 pm
Bill Illis says:
July 30, 2014 at 9:11 pm
>>>>>>>>>>
Bill, in the first link, I am baffled by what the orange line represents. At first glance, I thought it was simply CO2 concentration anomalies. But on closer inspection, it seems to be some sort of quantification of warming due to CO2 based on a sensitivity of 3.0 degrees C per doubling. Can you expand on this? As written, it makes little sense.
+++++++++++++
David: I am glad you pointed this out. I thought the same thing, “it seems to be some sort of quantification of warming due to CO2 based on a sensitivity of 3.0 degrees C per doubling. ”
My guess was that he was showing what the temperature should be if the theory “on a sensitivity of 3.0 degrees C per doubling” were correct.

CO2 is just following temperature as it always has, but it is not the continents either. It has been a long slow slide into our current ice age and its ridonkulous fluctuations since the Eocene. It got cold. Cold and crazy. But it got equally cold in the Carbo-Permian glaciation (and there is evidence that it was equally crazy in the Honaker Trail formation in Utah); when the trans Antarctic current was completely shut off.
It is abundantly clear that glaciations occur regardless of CO2 concentration and continental configuration.

July 30, 2014 at 7:53 pm | Jimmy Haigh. says:
I wonder how they managed to get funding for this?http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0902882
ARRA Amount: $472,346.00
Collaborative Research: Integrating proxies and Earth System Models to elucidate water cycle dynamics:Did global warming cause an enhanced hydrological cycle in the Eocene?

“The Venus syndrome is the greatest threat to the planet, to humanity’s continuing existence… In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn all the tar sands and tar shale (aka oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty.”
-Dr. James Hansen, NASA climatologist

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